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Along with the industrial transformation, Taiwan's economy developed rapidly. Profit-seeking enterprises have gradually begun to prosper in Taiwan, and a large amount of business waste is generated from the operations of profit-seeking enterprises every year. According to the Environmental Protection Administration of Taiwan, the total amount of business waste in 19 counties and cities in Taiwan was 22,092,113 tons in 2018. Thus, the issue of business waste disposal cannot be ignored by local governments. In this research, a two-stage dynamic undesirable data envelopment analysis model is adopted to analyze the production efficiency of profit-seeking enterprises and the efficiency of business waste treatment in counties and cities from 2014 to 2018 in Taiwan. The results are as follows: 1. Chiayi City, Kaohsiung City, Taitung County, and Yunlin County had good performance in terms of the development of profit-seeking enterprises and the treatment of business waste. 2. Among the six main municipalities, Kaohsiung City had the best efficiency performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's society appears prosperous, but it faces the challenges of unbalanced development due to climate change, economic growth, social equality, and a growing gap between the rich and the poor. A good government can help people and enterprises continue to progress and develop sustainably in the country and at the same time make the people happy. Therefore, the ruling party's governance should not only take into account the issue of efficiency, but also consider the needs and feelings of the people. Based on the three dimensions of society, economy, and environment in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations, using the three parallel network Dynamic Directional Distance Function, and considering the interdependent network structure composed of interrelated sub-units, this research evaluates and analyzes the government efficiency and public satisfaction efficiency of local governments in 22 counties and cities in Taiwan from 2016 to 2019 as well as the correlation between public evaluation and governance effectiveness. The empirical results show from the performance of government efficiency of county and city governments in Taiwan that there are large differences in economic and environmental aspects, but small differences in social aspects. The correlation coefficients of the social, economic, and environmental efficiencies are all positive, but the correlation coefficients of public satisfaction efficiency with these same three aspects are all negatively correlated. These results show first that local governments should review the inefficient aspects to improve their resource allocation. Second, they reflect the network characteristics that society, economy, and environment are linked and complement each other, which follow the need for sustainable development by the United Nations after taking into account social, economic, and environmental factors. Third, the performance of government efficiency is not reflected in the public satisfaction rate, and the satisfaction of the people is a subjective rather than an objective decision of local government efficiency. Therefore, to achieve the goal of improving efficiency and happiness, local governments must also understand the expectations of the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies resampling data envelopment analyses (DEA) and includes two estimation models: Triangular and Past–Present Models, to explore the operating efficiency of 37 commercial banks in Taiwan from 2014 to 2016. The empirical results are as follows: 1. No matter which models were used, the most inefficient banks from 2014 to 2016 were Bank of PANHSIN. 2. Resample model can more accurately estimate the relative efficiency of the banks than the slacks‐based measure (SBM) model. 3. Based on the Resample model, the empirical results of the SBM model show that the overestimation of the efficiency ranking is more serious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past literature is lack of consideration on financial technology (fintech) and undesirable output. We aim to understand the reasons underlying the operating performance of fintech in these securities firms and provide suggestions to them for promoting this growing technology phenomenon. This research employs the modified dynamic slacks‐based measurement (SBM) model to explore the electronic transaction efficiency of 38 securities firms in Taiwan. The research results show that most integrated and specialist securities firms fail to achieve the best efficiency in fintech operating performance, and large‐ and medium‐sized integrated securities firms do not achieve economies of scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments have used deficit policies in recent years, yet many still face fiscal debt problems. Thus, this research uses Range Directional Measure Dynamic Directional Distance Function model with negative data to explore the financial efficiency of local governments in Taiwan from 2011 to 2018. This article has three major contributions: (1) The research uses RDM Dynamic DDF model with negative data to solve the problem of negative values on input and output data and uses dynamic models to make up for the deficiencies of past research. (2) Due to the differences in regions, local governments have different fiscal budgets. Therefore, this article uses the Wilcoxon Test to explore the efficiency differences of local governments in different regions. (3) This article analyzes the impact of central subsidies and government deficits (debts) of local governments on fiscal efficiency, and discusses the efficiency of government fiscal execution. The results are as follows. (1) Seven counties and cities with the best efficiency, and seven local governments with poor efficiency. (2) The fiscal performances of outlying islands and eastern local governments are better than those of western local governments. (3) Kaohsiung City has the highest accumulated debt and Tainan City exhibits poor financial performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the trend of global economic globalization and financial technology innovation, Taiwan's financial industry is facing greater challenges and competition. This research uses the Resample Slacks‐Based Measure and Merger Potential Gains model, which is different from postmerger efficiency evaluation, and uses the concept of premerger evaluations to analyze the technical efficiencies of 14 financial holding banks in Taiwan from 2015 to 2019. The results show that there are positive and postmerger efficiency gains, and there is no guarantee that there will be efficiency gains for financial holding company after the merger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to understand how local enterprises establish brand awareness through tough entrepreneurship as well as focus on international markets so as to inject new ideas and to promote brand value. Examining this issue experimentally on B coffee company with data from Taiwan and China during 2010 to 2012, we use Network Meta-Frontier Data Envelopment Analysis to estimate the cross-strait performances of this firm in order to examine their differences and to propose direction for subsequent improvement. The empirical results are as follows. First, from 2010 to 2012 the channel scale and output in Taiwan is superior to that in China. Second, the performance of China's channels is on the decline with large fluctuations, whereas Taiwan's channels are getting better. Third, analyzing the average efficiency value of both sides comprehensively, we find that Taiwan's channels perform more steadily due to a longer time of establishment and more mature allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses resampling data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the performance of Taiwan's financial institutions over the period 2012–2017. The results show that Tachin, Grand, CapitalFS, and Fubon are among the top 10 for good performance, but they present a larger confidence interval bias (I-bias), indicating their inputs and outputs are unstable, and thus these financial institutions must improve their overall business strategy. The insurance group (INSG) has higher efficiency than the financial holding group (FHG) and securities group (SECG) over the period 2012–2017, showing that its performance is relatively stable and that its future performance trends do not change much. The efficiencies of the groups exhibit very significant differences in higher and other of return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE) via the Wilcoxon test. The business efficiency of INSG is the best and that of SECG is the worst. Overall, the government should provide a more prudent strategy to monitor the operations of SECG groups in order to reduce investors' investment risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding the balance between economic development and environmental protection is a major problem for many countries around the world. Air pollution caused by economic growth has caused serious damage to humans' living environment, and as improving energy and resource efficiencies is the first priority, many countries are targeting to move towards a sustainable environment and economic development. This study uses the modified dynamic SBM (slack-based measure) model to explore the economic efficiency and air pollutants emission efficiency in Taiwan's counties and cities from 2012 to 2015 by taking labor, motor vehicles, and electricity consumption as inputs and average disposable income as output. Particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen oxide emissions (NO2), and sulfur oxide emissions (SO2) are undesirable outputs, whereas factory fixed assets are a carry-over variable, and the results show the following: (1) the regions with the best overall efficiency between 2012 and 2015 include Taipei City, Keelung City, Hsinchu City, Chiayi City, and Taitung County; (2) in counties and cities with poor overall efficiency performance, the average disposable income per household has no significant relationship with air pollutant emissions; (3) in counties and cities where overall efficiency is poor, the average efficiency of each household's disposable income is small; and (4) except for the five counties and cities with the best overall performance, the three air pollutants in the other fourteen counties and cities are high. Overall, the air pollution of most areas needs improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased global competition has led to a slowdown in Taiwan's domestic semiconductor industry growth, which has resulted in many semiconductor companies reducing their investments and or seeking mergers and acquisitions (M & As) to increase market power, expand their business territories or increase their competitive edge. However, as there is general uncertainty regarding the efficiencies to be gained from these M & As, there has been an increase in M & A supervision. While past research has explored company operations and management efficiency after mergers, there has been less focus on potential mergers. Therefore, this study used a resample slacks-based measure (RSBM) and merger potential gains models to evaluate potential merger efficiency gains. Data on 29 Taiwanese-listed integrated circuit (IC) design industry firms were collected to evaluate the efficiency of potential M & As, from which it was found that the potential M & As efficiencies had positive and negative values, indicating that efficiency gains were not guaranteed. A positive value was found for a potential M & A between MTK & NOVATEK and MTK & DAVICOM, which meant that a potential M & A would increase operating efficiencies and reduce costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been constantly used to measure the technical efficiency of decision‐making units (DMUs). However, the major problem of traditional DEA methods is that they do not consider the possible intermediate effects. Recently, many papers have applied network DEA models to evaluate the efficiency scores. However, the linking activity of DMUs is still hard to be recognized. Hence, we employ DEMATEL to obtain the linking activity of DMUs. Our empirical research shows that the proposed method can soundly deal with the purpose of identifying the relationship between variables and derive the reasonable result in network DEA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In conventional multistage data envelopment analysis (DEA) studies, different hotel types are mostly assumed to be in a single technology set. However, the assumption that a single technology can have multiple operating types has been criticized by researchers in the past. To overcome this shortcoming, the main propose of this study is to establish a combination of the models of Tone and Chen and Zhu in order to assess the efficiencies of two hotel types. We first provide evidence that there is an existing defect arising from the direct combination of the two models. The nonhomogeneous two-stage model is established to evaluate the operational and expense utilization efficiencies for the Taiwanese international tourist hotels. The results verify that the defect from the direct combination of these models can be corrected by the new model. Empirical evaluation reveals that independent hotels have higher expense utilization efficiency and chain hotels have higher operational efficiency. The evaluation also indicates that tourist hotels can achieve best practices through a mutual learning strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the operational and market efficiencies of various biotechnological company formats in Taiwan during the period 2006 to 2008 by adopting the two-stage directional distance function and the meta-frontier concept. It conducts an efficiency assessment by taking into account a five-year time lag between R&D investments and actually obtaining a patent in order to better reflect the actual business operating process and thus more accurately gauge the efficiency of business operations in biotechnological companies. The empirical results show that non-listed companies registered better operational efficiency in the first stage, whereas their market efficiency in the second stage is inferior to that of listed companies when the meta-technology set is used as a basis. The average operation gap ratio and market gap ratio of non-listed companies exceeded those of listed firms, indicating that the technological heterogeneity (i.e., the gap) of non-listed companies is smaller than that of listed ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature assumes that Taiwan's international tourist hotels have identical frontier technology to evaluate non-radial efficiencies, even if they characterize different operating types. This study develops a non-radial systems model, for which the different operating types are evaluated based on different frontier technologies in order to calculate efficiencies. Compared to the radial systems model, the new model is able to practice two verifications. First, efficient units can be separated into strong and weak efficient sets. The second finds the benchmark among the different types for each input and output. The empirical results show that most efficient units reflect strong efficiency while only one hotel reflects weak efficiency. Inefficient hotels should refer to the chain type in order to improve excess utilizations in employees, rooms, catering space, and revenue deficits. For improving excess operating expenses and occupancy rate deficits, inefficient hotels should refer to the independent type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we adopt the two Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods, including Banker-Charnes-Cooper (BCC) and Slacks-based Measure (SBM) super efficiency, to investigate whether a bank's technical efficiency index's results, incorporating account risk and not incorporating account risk, differ significantly. The information is obtained from 43 Taiwanese banks for the period 1998 to 2002. We also employ the nonradial and slacks-based Malmquist Total Factor Productivity (TFP) index to measure the impact of productivity change on the panel data. Our empirical results from the DEA approach are summarized as follows: (1) Loan quality factors have an impact on a bank's efficiency. In general, the bank with a higher degree of problem loans drops down its efficiency by incorporating account risk; however, the bank with a lower degree of problem loans increases its efficiency by incorporating account risk. (2) Super efficiency provides a good framework for ranking efficient units. (3) Based on the nonradial and slacks-based Malmquist TFP index, we find that bank productivity has increased and technical change has improved. (4) In Taiwan, bank with a higher performance will be more secure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study adopts the data envelopment analysis (DEA), including the Banker, Charnes, and Cooper and system DEA estimation, to investigate the operating efficiency of Taiwanese Hotels under different efficient frontier systems. The results are summarised as follows: (1) the efficiency of chain-operated hotels are higher than the efficiency of independent-operated hotels; (2) if different frontier systems are assessed by the same frontier, then it will cause a wrong judgement in efficient reference sets; (3) if the hotels are treated as independent samples, then some inefficient hotels are mistaken as being efficient; and (4) the independent type take the chain type as efficient reference sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we use the data envelopment analysis to measure the efficiency of banks before and after credit rating is taken into consideration and we also employ the Malmquist Productivity Index to measure the total factor productivity changes from 2001 to 2003. The results are as follows: (1) There is a positive relationship between the efficiency scores and credit rating, and thus, the credit rating can be a representative to evaluate the performance and quality of a bank; (2) We use the Wilconxon two-sample test of nonparametric statistic to test the influences of credit rating. The empirical result shows that the credit rating is proven to influence the efficiency of banks; (3) The efficiency scores improve in both investment grade (above tw BBB-) and speculation grade (under tw BBB-), when credit rating is taken into consideration. The empirical results show that the efficiency scores of banks with a high credit rating improved relatively more when compared to banks with a lower credit rating; (4) In this research we also adopt the Malmquist index to observe the productivity and efficiency changes from year to year. We obtain results whereby the improvement of efficiency may be influenced greatly both from pure technical and scale efficiency changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to keen competition, banks may increase their market share and profits by imposing price policies, such as raising deposit rates, lowering loan rates, or even worse by loaning to those with high risks, which all could increase the probability of bankruptcy. Under these circumstances, the literature has paid great attention to the topics of bankruptcy and risk management. We adopt a two-stage approach, the Super-SBM and logistic regression, to investigate a bank efficiency index and the bank bankruptcy effect from incorporating capital adequacy regulations and a supervisory review process. This study uses data on 36 Taiwanese commercial banks for the 3-year period from 2002 to 2004. This article's empirical results from the Super-SBM and logistic regression approach are summarized as follows: (1) The efficiency factor is proven to be influential in evaluating bank bankruptcy. (2) If certain prerequisites on capital adequacy are imposed on each bank, then it results in a lower risk to the bank and this reduces bank bankruptcy. (3) Corporate governance plays an important role in bank bankruptcy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study the researchers adopt two DEA methods - Banker-Charnes-Cooper and Super Efficiency - to investigate whether a bank's technical efficiency is significantly different when capital adequacy (risk) is specified compared with when capital adequacy (risk) is not specified. The information is obtained from 46 Taiwanese banks for the period 2000 to 2002. The Malmquist total factor productivity (TFP) index is employed to measure the impact of productivity change on the panel data. The empirical results from the DEA approach are summarized as follows: (1) Capital adequacy is proven to be an influential factor in evaluating the efficiency of banks. (2) The average efficiency scores of banks with high capital adequacy (>8%) are significantly higher than those of banks with lower capital adequacy (<8%). (3) The efficiency scores of banks with high risk capital requirement (above the average) are higher than those of banks with lower risk capital requirement (under the average). (4) Banks with both high capital adequacy and high risk capital requirement are superior in performance than all the other banks, while banks with both low capital adequacy and low-risk capital requirement performance are the worst by contrast. (5) Based on the Malmquist total TFP index, we find that bank productivity has not increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we adopt a stochastic cost frontier method to investigate the influence of off-balance sheet (OBS) activities on the cost efficiency of Taiwan's banks. We estimate and compare cost inefficiency with or without OBS outputs of 46 Taiwanese commercial banks during the period, 1998 through 2001. The conclusions of this empirical study are as follows. First, omitting off-balance sheet outputs in estimating the cost frontier function of banks results in an underestimation of bank efficiency by approximately 5 per cent. Second, large banks are associated with a higher cost efficiency and have an increased ability to develop OBS activities. This is consistent with Taiwan's regulatory policies, which focus on promoting efficiency in the banking industry of emerging markets. Banks with higher employee productivity are also more cost efficient. Finally, we observe evidence of economies of scale in both models with or without OBS specification in Taiwan's bank industry. Economies of scope between loans and OBS outputs are also observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1990s, Taiwan began her deregulation trend in order to enhance competition and economic efficiency across all industries. We derive a theoretical framework to predict possible rankings in technical efficiencies of public, mixed, and private banks. A panel data set with 43 Taiwanese banks during 1997-1999 is used for empirical analysis. We then apply a translog distance function to estimate technical efficiencies. The relationship between technical efficiency and government shareholding is also examined. Empirical results show that a public bank in Taiwan can improve its technical efficiency by mixed ownership at a diminishing rate. Moreover, banks in Taiwan on average performed worse after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Data envelopment analysis (DEA) mainly utilizes envelopment technology to replace production function in microeconomics. The input and output of decision making units (DMUs) are projected into the attributes to evaluate or measure their performance. However, if the inputs and outputs are linguistically termed or are fuzzy-numbered, conventional DEA can not easily measure the performance. Therefore, we propose the use of a fuzzy super-efficiency slack-based measure DEA to analyze the operational performance of 24 commercial banks facing problems on loan and investment parameters with vague characteristics. After our analysis, we find that the fuzzy slack-based measure of efficiency (Fuzzy SBM)/fuzzy super-efficiency slack-based measure of efficiency (Fuzzy Super SBM) can not only effectively characterize uncertainty, but also have a higher capability to evaluate bank efficiency than the conventional Fuzzy DEA approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

With the development of China's economy, pollution has made serious impact on environment and human health. However, environmental protection and residents' health are becoming more and more important along with the country's social and economic transformation. Most existing studies have analyzed the path of economic impact on the environment and the production, pollution, and health in isolation. This research takes panel data of 30 provinces in China (including autonomous regions and municipalities, excluding Tibet, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) spanning 2014 to 2017 as an example, builds an evaluation indicator system on the basis of the three stages of economic production, wastewater treatment, and human health, and uses the undesirable three-stage dynamic data envelopment analysis model to empirically evaluate the total efficiency, stage efficiency, and the efficiency of various indicators. The research results show the average efficiency of the three stages in most provinces in four years is below 0.5, indicating the poor coordination of each stage; the efficiency gaps among the eastern, central, and western regions are very large because of the resource endowments, geographical environment, industrial structure, strategic adjustment, and other infactors. The total efficiency of the three stages of production input, wastewater treatment, and health output in the eastern region are higher than that of the central region and the western region. From the perspective of stage efficiency, most of the 30 provinces exhibit production efficiency < health efficiency < wastewater treatment efficiency. For the three-phase input and output indicators, the efficiency values and development trends of different provinces vary. The efficiencies of input variables in the wastewater treatment stage and health stage are low in most provinces. This means that the provinces should implement accurate policies according to their own evaluation results and improve the relevance and coordination among the three stages through reasonable allocation of medical input and arrangement of urban employment.